The Future of Digital Reference Services??

[Sloan, Bernie]

I've been in the process of updating my digital reference services
bibliography and, as I go through it, I notice some general patterns in
papers written about various technologies used to support digital reference
services.

The first widespread use of technology in support of digital reference
services seems to be e-mail. Howard and Jankowski wrote about e-mail
reference in the January 1986 issue of the Bulletin of the Medical Library
Association. Bristow described e-mail reference services at Indiana
University in the November 1992 issue of College and Research Libraries
News. Then a flurry of articles began in the mid 1990s, continuing until the
present day.

A number of articles on the use of MUDs and MOOs for reference services
appeared in the mid 1990s, at about the same time that the interest in
e-mail reference began in earnest. The interest in MUD/MOO technology
tapered off after the closing of the Internet Public Library's pilot
project, whcih met with limited success.

Interest in the use of desktop videoconferencing also peaked in the mid
1990s, with a writeup in the Chronicle of Higher Education in the summer of
1996, and two papers presented at the 1997 ACRL conference. These two papers
discussed pilot projects conducted at the University of Michigan, and at the
University of California-Irvine. These two projects also met with limited
success, and video reference faded from the public consciousness.

While the experiments with MUDs and MOOs and videoconferencing were going
on, e-mail reference services became more and more common, to the point
where thousands of libraries offer such services today.

Within the past year or two, chat-based technologies for reference services
have replaced e-mail reference services in popularity, if not in actual use.
Chat services started with the use of simple technologies such as AOL
Instant Messenger. As e-commerce expanded, Web-based customer call center
software appeared, and was adapted for use in digital reference services.
These services were based on chat, but also offered such functionalities as
co-browsing and pushing Web pages to the user.

While live, interactive chat-based services have drawn some attention away
from more prosaic services such as e-mail reference, I can't help but wonder
what might be waiting on the horizon to steal the thunder away from
chat-based services? What's the next technology that will impact digital
reference services? Will videoconferencing make a comeback as cameras become
more commonplace? Will voice-over-IP applications lessen the need for chat
sessions in Web call center software as microphones become more common as
computer peripherals? At least one call center software vendor (Convey
Systems) already offers the options of interactive voice and video, in
addition to chat.

Or will digital reference services become more automated? The OPAL Project
at the UK's Open University is described as "an eighteen month research
project which is exploring the development of a fully automated online 24/7
reference service for students." Part of the project will attempt to use
agent-based architecture to create a generic "artificial librarian", capable
of answering  complex questions about library resources. (See
http://oulib1.open.ac.uk/wh/research/opal/intro.html). 

Or will e-mail continue to be the default medium for digital reference
services as we experiment with other technologies that meet with "limited
success"?

I am interested in hearing what others might think about the future of
digital reference services.

Thanks!

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
338 Henry Administration Building
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL  61801
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax:     (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies at uillinois.edu